Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed, and leads ongoing projects such as NISO’s participation in the Coalition for Seamless Access. He is also the Director of the NISO Plus Conference.
Prior to joining NISO, he was the founder and principal at Evenly Distributed (http://evenlydistributed.net), a technology consulting and creation firm for libraries, museums, education, and other non-profits. Griffey was also an Affiliate at MetaLab at Harvard, an idea foundry, knowledge-design lab, and production studio experimenting in the networked arts and humanities. He is a former Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where he studied hyperlocal micronetworks such as his LibraryBox Project and worked on technologies that provide open and robust access to information for the future, such as blockchain and other decentralization technologies. Griffey was formerly an Associate Professor and Head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Griffey has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design for ALA. Named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker in 2009, Griffey has formally revoked that award in protest of the Library of the Year award given by LJ in 2020.
Griffey has written and spoken internationally on topics such as the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. In 2018, Griffey delivered the Gloriana St. Clair Distinguished Lecture in 21st Century Librarianship for the Carnegie Mellon campus in Education City, Qatar. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces.
Griffey is the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system. He can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.
4 replies on “about”
Jason,
It was nice to see you at the ALLA convention in Huntsville last week!
I tried to download your presentation while at the convention but didn’t have any luck. Can you either send it to me or post to your web site so I can download?
Thanks and good luck with your new venture!
:),
Carrie Steinmehl
Technology Coordinator
Hoover Public Library
Hi Jason,
I am trying to bring some people together around Raspberry Pi and resource sharing / offline library. Would you be happy to chat? If so, could you drop me a message via email?
Many thanks,
Bjoern
Hi Jason,
I don’t see an email address for you, hence this public comment.
The reason why Windows desktops are popular in public libraries is that Windows machines are incredibly cheap, easy to service, reliable, and get the job done. Without even bargain-hunting, you can get a fast desktop PC with 3-year warranty for under $600. Of over 100 desktops in our library, our failure rate has been under 2% per year. Plus, the vast majority of PCs in the world run Windows, and it’s best to expose patrons to systems they’re liable to use in real life.
General-purpose computers are commodities. It should be a crime to waste taxpayer money to buy an upscale brand name for a commodity product.
My email is public (you can actually google for it) but I don’t mind replying in public. 🙂 I assume this comment is pointed at my also-public love for Apple computers, although I imagine it could also be about my general support of increasing mobile device availability in libraries. I am well and aware of these things, having been a Windows user since the 3.1 days. I suppose my most pointed reply would be that if cost were the only concern (and you are discounting a LOT when it comes to the cost of your machines, including the need for specialized security software and the infrastructure to support and manage Microsoft products) that you should probably be buying bare systems and installing Linux for free. That would reduce the cost of the system by another 5-10% at least.
But even with that, I don’t think I would begin to suggest that libraries should be Mac only, or that Apple OR linux devices should be the primary computing platform for the public in a library. If I were going to make such an argument, again, I would probably argue for Linux rather than Apple if we were simply making universal statements about rolling out masses of computers. Or better yet, Chromebooks for the masses, given usage patterns and web-focus.